Chapter 15
Elara
Evening had set in and after not being able to find Lance anywhere in the vicinity of the dining room, I knew there was only one place he was likely to be right now.
“Good evening, brother.” I burst through his chamber doors. Only considering, after the fact, that I could have discovered Lance in some compromising position.
Luckily for me, he was only passed out, as I’d expected. The Prince of Everness lay draped over his expensive bedding, his face on the blankets.
When my initial burst didn’t earn a response from him, I made an effort to close the doors extra hard behind me.
This time, I received a groan in return.
“I need to have a word with you.” I stepped further into the room, expecting to find a mess, but it was surprisingly tidy. A servant must have recently been in to clean.
“Not now,” came a grumble from the sheets.
“Should I ask the servants for a bucket of cold water, then?” This seemed to grab Lance’s attention enough that he rolled over onto his back.
“Why do you hate me so?” he asked dramatically.
“We do not want to get on that boat right now.” To say I wasn’t fond of my brother would be an understatement.
Especially considering the absolute rude idiot he could be at times.
Though I would admit, in the months that we’d been living together, I could feel the elements of my distrust towards him begin to slip through the cracks.
Instead of a threat, Lance had become more of an annoyance.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be helpful on occasion. Which was exactly why I was there.
“We found the diary,” I said, crossing my arms.
“Good for you,” Lance responded, with his eyes still closed.
“At least I think it’s the diary. The problem is that it’s locked in a box.
” After finding the wooden box, Rhen and I had searched the library from top to bottom for another key, including trying the one from the cupboard, but nothing could open the box.
Out of desperation, I even tried to smash it, but it would not give.
“And I can’t get it open. I even tried to break it. ”
“That’s because it’s protected by magic.” Lance slowly rolled onto his side and used the bedpost to pull himself into a sitting position. “You need a special key,” he finished, and my eyes widened.
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
Lance opened his eyes after realising that he’d given himself away, but did not respond.
“Is there something you’d like to tell me?” I tried to push any growing anger down into the depths of myself. “Like how you know much more about the diary than you’ve let on?”
“And so, what if I do?” he said, with a nonchalance that only managed to spike my annoyance.
“Are you insane? You know how important this is!”
“Did you ever consider that maybe I was trying to save everyone from inevitable disappointment?” he said as I stomped over to him.
“Of course I didn’t consider it,” I responded harshly. “That would require you to think about someone other than yourself.”
He gave me a look to suggest he didn’t appreciate my sarcasm.
“That’s not a nice thing to say to someone whose help you currently require.”
I stared at him, not bothering to apologise. “Tell me what you know.”
“Ah but it doesn’t work that way.” Lance sloppily lifted a finger. “You and I bargain for things, remember?”
“Lance.” I scolded him like he was a child, especially because he was busy acting like one. “I know it might be hard for you to believe but this isn’t about you. This is about all of us, and once upon a time you were willing to do a hell of a lot of damage to protect Everness.”
“Yes, but that was before you lied to me.” He tilted his head while I imagined hitting it with a particularly blunt object.
“What are you talking about?”
“You had me believe that I was crazy for going after the Myrgonite stones and those objects. You had me thinking I was truly losing it, and yet here we are, and suddenly you seem to know an awful lot about them.”
“I did think you were insane back then,” I told him truthfully. “But that was before I knew about all this, before Cai even knew.”
“But you know about the three magical objects now, don’t you? You know all about it. I bet you even know what they are.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I felt my face grow hot. “If we knew that, then I wouldn’t be looking for the diary, would I?”
Lance didn’t look like he entirely believed me. I guessed it took a liar to know one.
“What do you want to bargain, then?” I needed this conversation to be over as quickly as possible. There was little use in trying to talk with Lance when he was in this state, but I feared we were running out of time.
“I want one of them,” he said.
“You want what?”
“One of the Myrgonite objects. When this is over and you and Cai have collected your little jewels and saved the kingdom, I want what is rightfully mine.”
The only reason Cai and I were now actively looking for the objects was so that we could prevent them from getting into the wrong hands, or from getting into anyone’s hands ever again.
And that list definitely included Lance.
No one with that much attitude needed to have access to things containing ancient power that was beyond our comprehension.
“You’re funny,” I said sarcastically. “No.”
“Come now, Elara. I daresay you even owe it to me. One for you, one for Cai and one for me. It’s nice how it works out like that.
It will be safe in our hands. Just like our ancestors probably would have wanted it.
The objects will be out of harm’s way and our kingdoms will be at peace. Everybody wins.”
“If Cai and I should find those objects, the only thing we will be doing with them is destroying them.”
“Destroy them?” Lance frowned. “Didn’t you know that they cannot be destroyed?”
My expression told him I did not.
“I’m surprised that in all your research you had yet to discover this. The magic that was used on the stones also protects them. If you should try to destroy any of the objects, it would kill you and anyone in the vicinity.”
I suddenly felt foolish for believing that Cai and I would so easily be rid of the objects once we’d discovered them. Of course the stones couldn’t just be destroyed, otherwise someone would have done it a long time ago. I tried to prevent the frustration reaching my face.
So many thoughts were running through my head, and combined with the many sleepless nights, I was no longer thinking straight.
Cai and I had our suspicions about what some of the objects could be.
Both the heirloom necklace and the dagger he’d given me appeared to have small Myrgonite stones in them.
But that didn’t make them the magical objects that belonged to Queen Riona all those centuries ago.
We needed the diary to be certain, and if we couldn’t destroy them, then we had to find another way to keep them hidden from the world.
“All right, then,” I reluctantly agreed, surprising both myself and Lance. “How do I get to the diary, then?”
“I don’t know if the diary is in there for sure, but I know it can’t be opened.”
“You just said it could. All we need is the key.”
His facial expression suggested I was being naive. “Don’t you think that if it were that easy to get the key, we would have already had it by now?”
All the hope and excitement from earlier started to drift away from me. We’d come so far.
“It can’t be that difficult.” I placed my hands on my hips. “Where is it, then?”
“It’s a story Mother once told me, when I was a child.”
I was momentarily surprised. Lance had never spoken about our mother before.
“She used to love history and reading.”
I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was jealous of Lance knowing our mother before she died. Even after I’d gone through her things. It was difficult to miss someone I’d only seen in paintings. But I’d never heard Lance bring her up until now, so this had to be worth something.
He carefully got up, taking a moment to find his footing. Lance stumbled to the dressing table not too far from his bed and started drinking water from the pitcher that was meant for cleaning his face.
I avoided rolling my eyes, staying quiet so that he would keep talking.
“She knew so much about the kingdom. I don’t know where she’d heard the tale or if it was just some made-up childhood story.
But Mother believed the key to be in the centre of the forest.” I couldn’t help but gulp as soon as he’d said the words.
The mere memory of that day created a knot in my stomach.
The day I’d lost Ray. Cai and I walking through those misty woods, unsure if we would ever get out alive.
“Where in the centre of the forest?” I dared to ask.
“There’s a large willow tree in the middle of it all, the oldest tree in the kingdom. Mother used to say that somewhere inside the tree, the key was hidden to all Everness’s secrets.”
That sounded promising.
“But it didn’t come without a cost. You had to reach into the willow tree with your hand, and if the tree found you unworthy, it would kill you by taking your soul and then morph you into the tree itself.” Well, that was a nice image to think about.
“If this is true, then why didn’t King Magnus ever do something about it?”
Lance snorted, taking a seat on the bed again.
“Father had no interest in that sort of thing. In fact, he was rather against it.” For some reason, this didn’t surprise me.
Magnus never came across as the kind of king who would be in support of using magic.
Although, looking back at all the trouble it had caused us, that may not have been entirely unreasonable.
“And what about you, then? You nearly caused a war with Norrandale trying to find out more about those Myrgonite stones.” And here he was, still chasing after them.
“I found the box a long time ago and tried everything to open it. But I think it comes down to getting that key. I’ve sent men from the palace repeatedly, but none of them have come back alive.”
Well, of course not. Not if the magical and deadly mist in the centre of the forest could help it. Cai and I hadn’t told anyone about our experience in the mist. And I wasn’t about to spill it to Lance either.
“So why didn’t you just go into the forest and retrieve it yourself?”
He scoffed. “And get sucked in by a tree? No thank you.” It may have been a cowardly answer, but if what Lance said was true and one had to be deemed worthy to retrieve the key, then we both knew there was no way he was getting it. The question remained: who would be deemed worthy?
“So basically, you’ve been no help to me at all.”
“That’s not true,” Lance said. “I told you how to open the box.”
“Yes, with some fabled key in the deadliest place in the forest, where some old tree is going to try and murder us.”
“I never promised it would be easy.”
I wanted to shake my head and scream and cry all at once. Every time it felt like we were making a little progress, we were forced to take a few steps back.
“No, you never did,” I said truthfully, once again reminded why Lance didn’t want to be king in the first place.
“Have you been to see Eloisa?”
My brother looked surprised at the sudden change of topic.
“Yes, why?”
“No reason. I just heard she asked for you a lot.” I hadn’t been visiting Eloisa much. Not that she ever responded to me when I was there, and according to her physician, she wasn’t really getting better.
“Well, I’m just about the only family she knows.”
I wasn’t sure what Lance’s intentions were behind his words.
“Magnus wasn’t very fond of her, then?”
“I think it was easier for Father to pretend she didn’t exist.”
I wasn’t surprised by this, though Lance stepping up to take any care of her at all did always make me wonder. Even though we were related, he definitely wasn’t the most brotherly person I knew.
“Does she talk to you?” I ventured to ask, being at least a little curious as to exactly what kind of relationship he had with Eloisa.
“Not often,” Lance confirmed. “But she looks at me sometimes and I know she knows who I am, even if she can’t say it.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. The topic had become rather personal, and at the risk of getting vulnerably intimate with the man who had bargained magic for information a few minutes ago, I took a step back.
“Well, I’d better get going, then. See what I can do about that key.” The stars knew we had to find it, one way or another.